heartlines
by orpheus-under-starlight
Summary: "Young man, follow me into the darkness and I will consecrate your bones for glory in the high tombs of the dark and the forgotten." (Or: "You underestimate Skywalker." She bares her teeth, bright and brilliant and blazing. "And Ben Solo. /And me.")/
1. Chapter 1

That Ben Solo walks the line between dreams and reality even in his youngest years is something he never thinks to question. He is strong with the Force, gifted, beloved, both his mother and Uncle Luke say so, and thus it is only natural that the boons it brings to him—the glimpses of the future, the girl with the bright saber and the strong shoulders—are nothing exceptional.

Like his uncle before him, he watches the horizon and sees both that which is and that which is not. Past, present, future, all of these blend together in the Force, and for a young boy sitting alone in drafty chambers that swallow him and his thin shoulders whole in the hugeness of their arched ceilings and cold walls, there is little use in a wakefulness with no good thing to attract his attention beyond the various skylines he finds himself parked in front of.

So Ben sleeps, and Ben dreams, and Ben learns that the Force has many applications.

In a galaxy where a great degree of Force-based knowledge survived the fury of Darth Vader, Ben might have learned through his uncle, studious later in life, that Ben was in the process of rediscovering an ancient art. A secretive one, at that, given that flow-walking—the act of giving oneself to the Force, and in the process feeling out history through its eyes—was forged and refined by the Aing-Tii monks, beings that dwelled quietly with one another on a planet tucked away deep within the Kathol Rift, rarely bothered by outsiders.

But in _this_ galaxy, the knowledge of eras past burned as Vader himself did on Mustafar, and so Vader's grandson is left to his own devices.

Perhaps, in the end, there was always meant to be some element of fate in that.

Thus Ben Solo wanders hyperlanes, explores forgotten temples, observes forbidding oceans as they fill canyons, and watches mountains reveal themselves on snowy planets no sentient being has touched in many long ages, and he sees these things and a thousand more in the grey morning light of Chandrila and the burning red sunsets of Hosnian Prime.

("You liked those old holodocs, eh, kid?" his father asks on a rare visit back, before the bad times but after the golden days when love was enough. Han's warm hand engulfs his small shoulder. "Maybe Chewie and I can rustle some more up on the next trip. Think you'd like that?"

Ben watches him carefully with his mother's dark eyes until the tentative smile leaves Han's face.

"Yes," Ben says. He does not mention that he watched Sholon, a Mid Rim planet with an acidic ocean, turn from a barren waste to a lush green land to an eternally frozen rock for many nights before Han's return, or that he had felt like if he only reached out with his hands and _pushed,_ he might make it go along a little faster. The knowledge feels dangerous, somehow, and he is old enough to know that his powers frighten Han.)

Had he only stuck to watching the formation of worlds, the geographic shifting of many living things reverberating in and with the Force, he might have some day grown up free and walked the galaxy himself, seeing it all with his own eyes, but one lonely night on a diplomatic space station orbiting Kubindi, Leia has been working late again and Ben's only company is a dull cleaning droid with subpar circuitry.

At least, that's what he tells himself when it hovers after being dismissed, and again when it disobeys a direct order to go.

Ben, young with floppy hair and ears that make him self-conscious, stares at the droid.

The droid stares back.

"Go," Ben repeats, and the droid does not go. He scowls. Droids have never been his thing. "You hunk of junk. Go on, scram. Don't you have other places on board to clean up?"

It is not entirely unlike something Han would say, and irrationally, he hates the droid a little more for it.

 _Crush it,_ something soft and sibilant whispers within him. _Show it what its options are._

His eyes widen.

 _Yes,_ the voice in him croons, sweeter than a song.

 _No,_ Ben tries, wiggling the thought like one of his loose teeth, worrying at the fresh memory of the words, spoken in his own voice. He knows he is easily irritated. But surely, surely— _I wouldn't do that. What did the droid do?_

An ageless rush of ancient air, the sound of a sigh in his own ribcage, and his mouth, never once moving: these are the things he hears and feels, these phantom sensations moving in tandem with the currents his mind has become attuned to, and it does not unsettle him as much as it ought to. _It reminded you._

 _Reminded me of what?_

 _That you are your father's son._

Ben _does_ suck in a breath, this time, and he isn't entirely sure whether or not the 'cycled air of the space station is really as clean as the taste of it might indicate, because along with the clinical disinfectant he catches a whiff of the smell of damp and mildew and the deep cold of a forgotten cavern far beneath the earth.

 _Where are you?_ he asks. He is not a _stupid_ boy, as much as he has not seen the galaxy beyond Leia's life and work.

Something sleepy and smiling and very, very ancient unfurls itself in the Force, spreading out and out and _out_ in its currents, a vast and fathomless awareness that sees his small, bright existence and finds it... pleasing.

 _The Maw,_ it purrs, and Ben Solo's head is crowned with the fleeting touch of the Other. It feels cool and dark, like an afternoon spent in the shadowy corners of his mother's apartments on Chandrila, lazing away as the sun wears on in oblivion. _You have wandered and wandered, yet only now do you come near. I have waited so long for this._

 _Child._

 _You are something truly special._

Despite everything, Ben believes it.

* * *

The thing about the voice is this:

At any point, Ben could stop. Stop listening, stop feeding its interest, stop playing into its hands. In fact—he should, and he knows it.

He should. It whispers of wrath and ruin, of the dark underside of all things, of the potential he has to have the galaxy lay itself at his feet and worship at the font of true power. It tells him he is precious, invaluable, inimitable, a searing brand across the minds of the unworthy, and it lays out a philosophy of dichotomies—the powerful and the powerless, the strong and the weak, those who endure and those who break.

Ben has sat by his mother's chair long enough to learn that nothing in the galaxy is so simple.

But he doesn't stop. And he keeps listening.

The voice shows him how to walk deeper into the Force, how to see more than the grand transformation of physical matter. It shows him how to weave his essence with the Force and how to return before plunging too deep; it speaks of ancient knowledge, long forgotten, and the jealously-guarded secrets of nations. By the voice's guidance he learns of Rakata Prime and the Star Forge, promising in exchange to one day go to it and take what he may of its capabilities, applying them to good use.

Ben is no fool, but he is hungry and lonely and his uncle is a kinder man to Ben's fellow students than he is to his nephew. When Ben's night terrors continue to strike after hours upon hours of careful meditation and reflection, Luke grows tired, grows frustrated, and he doesn't mean to speak as loudly as he does the night Ben overhears him tell Leia _there's something in him that he won't let anyone reach, not even me_.

 _A fool, Skywalker is,_ the voice murmurs. _He blinds himself to you. He does not want to see your powers because he fears the potential in them._

 _Skywalker does not trust you. Tread carefully._

Despite himself, Ben does.

* * *

 _Child._

 _Yes?_

 _You will come to me soon._

He will. He knows already. Ben Solo has walked the future and seen himself fly into the heart of the Maw.

He has seen himself come out unscathed.

There has never been a reason to doubt the currents of the Force, not in his early days when they showed him the passage of eons and not in the heartbeats spent traveling through hyperspace to a distant, dusty planet with his mother refusing to look at him, and there is certainly no reason to doubt them now when they show him what he is meant to be every night.

(Why, then, does something in him say _no, this is wrong, this is wrong?)_

A cool sensation brushes across his forehead as he finishes preparing for bed and finally, _finally_ curls up on the thin mattress, ready for blessed relief from the long day spent with Master Skywalker in frustrated silence, neither of them sure why his kyber crystal is suddenly refusing to cooperate with his 'saber.

 _I am pleased with your progress,_ the voice says, again smooth, again sibilant.

Ben is tired, and does not pay as much attention as he ought to.

 _Yes, Master,_ he whispers back, slipping away into the realm of dreams.

* * *

In retrospect, Rey thinks, she has always known the presence of something. It's _there_ , and it always has been.

Like Jakku. Seated on a rock in a jungle somewhere near the third leg of the Hydian Way, she casts her mind back and remembers the first days she became aware of _It:_ a presence deeper than the quicksand dunes to the southeast and wider than the vast expanse of the washed-out sky she spends most of her evenings staring at, hoping that the next ship that breaks the horizon line will be meant for her. _It_ is there in that quietness, there in that silence, and she never really rejects the Teedos claiming _It_ to be the presence of R'iia.

 _It,_ she remembers thinking, is too large to be encompassed by one form.

Maybe it's the dreams. Maybe it's the ocean—the certainty she has always had about the way an ocean ought to look, despite her years on Jakku spent surrounded by sand and the giant metal husks of ships, symbols of something terrible and great and (according to the spacers at Niima) very, very dead.

She has never seen the ocean, except she has.

(The little boy with dark hair and darker eyes has never guided her out of thrashing darkness she can never quite recall to the place where she can see the ocean most clearly, except he has.)

Rey has always waited for something.

So living in future tense doesn't really bother her, not the way it does Finn, whose private doubts drive him to anchor himself to the present moment.

"Rey, can you sense it?" he's asking, his voice impatient and his eyes anxious, bouncing his leg up and down on the uneven jungle floor.

Despite herself, despite the situation that got them into this position in the first place, a small, amused smile finds it way onto her face as she opens her eyes and looks directly at him. "I think _it_ will sense _us_ soon, if you don't stop _bouncing."_

Finn goes as still as a statue. Kaydel Co Connix, her hair buns unraveling in the humidity, stifles a laugh as she buries her head in her hands.

Here are the things Rey does not tell her friends, but would perhaps tell her enemies: there is a Jakku with her buried beneath the desert sands, there is a Jakku that has never seen her at all, and there is a Jakku she left hand in hand with a dark-haired boy she promised to protect. She has come into her powers and been using them for long enough—several months is enough, isn't it? It has to be—to know that all these things could have happened, but they did not.

The past is not the present is not the future. Rey thinks on these things, and many more, in the silence of her heart, and instead of finding a definitive answer she reaches out with her mind and guides their unfriendly guest away from their location, keeping her and her friends safe for another day.

They will rendezvous with Rose, who they had watched land somewhere near the horizon line, and they will return to the Resistance with the news of the First Order plasma production facility they had found deep in the heart of the jungle, and in all likelihood, they will return to either claim it for themselves or burn it to the ground.

 _We are the spark that will light the fire that will burn the First Order down,_ Poe has told Finn and Rose many times—multiple times—too many times. He is not a bad man, but he is a rash one. Normally, this sort of thing would never give Rey pause. As far as rashness goes, she's got absolutely no room to talk.

But.

Rey is not an official member of the Resistance. _It,_ the Force, long and old and ageless and always humming, remembers the echoes of things she has only ever heard of in fragments and long-winded spacer tales: the destruction of Malachor V, the sacking of Christophsis, the destruction of Jedha.

Of Alderaan, now only a legend spoken of in hushed whispers, its last royal looking wearier by the day.

She is the last Jedi, now. She represents hope in so many ways it makes her head spin.

Much of what the Jedi had done had been bunk.

Not all of it, though. So long as the idea of their role as peacekeepers remains, she will keep a seed of unease in her heart at the idea of burning more than is necessary, even if a wilder version of herself would not care one bit.

(At night, Rey has begun to dream. Time and space blend together and warp around the fabric of the galaxy, and she sees that which has been and that which is not. Where once there was the ocean and the darkness, now there is something like the mirror on Ahch-To: a shadow lit from behind by a greater light, and the Force, pleased.)

( _Starbright,_ she thinks when she wakes. She sees glimpses of supernovas behind her closed eyelids. She sees hope beyond them.)

* * *

Their first physical reunion happens, as these things so often do, by chance.

Not luck, per say. Rey thinks of the books she hid away on the Millennium Falcon and their teachings on the nature of the Force: _the Force in everything and working beyond us,_ they say, lost voices older than living memory, _the Force walking a path, and our occasional intersection._

That the later voices claim dominance over the Force, like Luke Skywalker had said, becomes somewhat boggling.

At any rate, Rey has flown to Antar 4 following a lead from Maz back on Takodana. The podracing tracks of Ord Ibanna near Sullust are vicious, brutal, and known for it. (Maz had seemed pleased by this, imperturbable as she has always been.) Not only do they have a high tendency to take the lives of the daredevils who try them, they also claim whatever survives of the wreckage—some odd podracer tradition, Rey suspects, as the ones she'd spoken to at one of Maz's secret spots had all regarded the debris said to line those particular circuits as sacred.

Apparently, someone didn't consider them sacred enough, as a fair few odd tokens that had once belonged to those who perished on Ord Ibanna have passed into the wider galactic market, if on its seedier side.

The word in Maz's circles is that the latest item to make it as far Coreward as Antar 4—an indication of its being in high demand—is a kyber crystal.

Having read what she's read in the past few months, Rey isn't entirely convinced that the severe rarity of kyber crystals nowadays is a bad thing. She needs one herself for fully, truly fixing her lightsaber, sure, but as powerful as they are, and as alluring as that is, the low grade of sentience all the old Jedi were convinced the kyber had...

There's something horrifying about it in the light of the Death Star.

Rey shivers, drawing her poncho closer to herself, and ducks under an overhang made of carved stone to avoid the strong gust of wind that sweeps through the busy streets of Kaard Mor, Antar 4's dusty, old capital.

A man makes a strangled noise in his throat nearby, and Rey looks sharply into the cool shadows leading to a cantina on the right only to find the wide eyes of Kylo Ren waiting for her, the man himself dressed in a simpler dark tunic and flexafiber pants than the last time she had seen him, a brown traveler's cloak latched firmly below his neck.

"What? What is it?" she demands, turning to him. She hadn't heard the silence and the small _pop_ connecting them this time, and she is hardly a fan of being caught off guard. "I'm not in the wash this time—"

"Rey?" he asks. His fingers twitch at his sides, as if he thought of reaching out and thought again very quickly.

She shuts her mouth and takes a second look at him. He doesn't look to be injured or delirious. Maybe there's a reason he's looking at her like he's never seen her before. "Yes?"

"Are you—" He stops, takes a step forward. Despite herself, she takes a step back into the wall, her shoulders hunching instinctively, and the look on his face could shatter planet cores.

Rey tries not to curl her fingers in her poncho or reach for her staff. She wants to fight him and she doesn't; she wants to wipe the heartbroken look away from his face and she wants him, desperately, and quite simply, to recognize the harm he has done to the people she loves. To recognize the harm he has done to her and to himself.

Kylo crosses his arms and steps into the opposite alcove instead, leaning against the stone wall and out of sight of the street, and something dizzying in the world slides off her axis and into the abyss as Rey realizes, belatedly, the importance of the sound of his boots against the ground and his cloak and tunic scraping against the wall.

"You're here," he says, his voice carefully modulated to be as neutral as Ben Solo can make it—which means Rey can hear every single shade of meaning in his inflection, and her heart aches with alarming intensity.

"I am." _And you are, too._

He takes in a slow breath. "Are you here for the kyber crystal?"

"Maybe," she says, as honestly as she can, because he has walked in her dreams and she in his, and lying to him now just seems—cruel, after the fact. But neither can she fully trust him.

 _I'm being torn apart,_ he is telling Han Solo on a metal bridge in the past, his heart bared to an audience of three in the levels above. _I know what I have to do, but I don't know if I have the strength to do it._

Kylo's eyes are dry now as they burn into her.

"I understand," he says, and time and space pulse between them, the last Jedi and the Jedi Killer, wasting precious standard hours on a planet only merchants come to. "I came for it, too. I sensed its presence. It's useful to me and my people."

"More superweapons in the making?" Rey asks, unable to hide the note of bitterness that seeps into her voice.

He smiles. It's small, imperceptible, tarnished. His mind is a deep ocean concealed by darkness, a yawning mouth in the Force, fettered by overgrown roots. "Maybe."

"Fair enough."

They fall silent, watching each other. The currents between them go far beyond her closing the door at Crait and him turning his back on her at their first subsequent connection; over the awkward silences that only two enemies can walk together, through her research and his inquisitions, they have come to know that the only thing that can break the thing between them apart is death.

Neither of them really want to die, any more. And neither of them can really bear the idea of the other dying.

"Did you ever imagine it would turn out like this?" Rey asks, sliding down into a squat with her back against the wall.

Kylo sighs. After a moment, acquiescing to her unspoken truce, he sits against his wall a tad more gracefully and rotates his wrist, a semi-mindless stretching exercise.

"No," he says after a pensive silence, an undercurrent of old hurt in his voice, but she can't do anything about that. Not right now, at least. "I've never thought much about the future."

Rey isn't sure what to offer in response to that, if anything. In a world where she could be perfectly honest, in a world before the Supremacy, she might've offered the old solace: _you're not alone._

She had never thought much about a life past her parents finding her again.

"When I dreamed of the ocean," she says instead, her staff pressing into her the longer she sits against the wall, "I could only see it after I fell out of the dark. Not the _Dark_ ," she clarifies at the drawn look on his face. "It was a memory, maybe. I think you were there."

Before he can figure out how to respond to that, a Rodian exits the cantina; Rey stares challengingly at them as they walk by, daring them to comment, but they only duck their head and increase their pace.

Kylo buries his face in his palm. "Rey…"

"What?" She switches her glare to him.

He opens his mouth, but shakes his head and looks directly at her instead of whatever he had thought of saying before. "I bought the kyber crystal from them."

Rey goes very still.

Kylo nods, slowly, not breaking eye contact, and reaches into his pockets. When he takes the kyber crystal out, she gawks at it.

"It's… small," she says after a moment of uncomprehending silence from Kylo. He could look into her mind for the answer, but they had agreed without speaking to stay out of each other's heads as much as possible. They may be stuck in this until the bitter end, but some things…

Some things just aren't safe enough to risk.

He stares at her. "You—expected it to be bigger?"

"It's a crystal, isn't it?" she asks, eyeing how snugly it fits into the palm of his gloved hand. A small part of her that hasn't left Jakku and its necessary pragmatism yet is calculating, judging the distance between them, how fast she could pull out her staff and seize the crystal, but most of her ignores that. "I sort of thought—maybe it would be fist-sized, being a crystal of power and all—"

"Just—take it," Kylo cuts in, struggling deeply for impassivity. He holds the kyber out to her.

She gapes. "I—what?"

You don't just _give_ something as valuable as a kyber crystal to your mortal enemy, even a complicated mortal enemy, unless it's a trap. That's universal, as far as she's been able to tell.

Kylo's eyes are dark and warm and there is a sadness in them that seems ancient for the briefest of moments when a ray of light catches them between clouds. When Antar 4's sun hides itself again—a matter of milliseconds in reality, and an eternity in the Force swirling around them—he mostly looks tired.

"Are you going to take it?" he asks.

Rey leans forward, but stops, giving him a wary look. "You're my enemy."

"I'm not your enemy, Rey." He tilts his head to the side, just a tad, studying her like he had all those months ago on Starkiller— _fascinated,_ she thinks for no reason at all. "You decided that I was."

 _You're not_ my _enemy,_ comes the thought, simmering in the air, and the Rodian must have kicked up the dust when they left, because Rey's throat feels tight.

"If I have to face you some day," she says quietly, focusing very hard on the worn blue stones that line the walkway, "aren't you my enemy? Won't I have to defeat you?"

Kylo breathes out, all the air escaping him in a rush, and he shuffles forward awkwardly—all limbs, no grace—to kneel in front of her, the kyber crystal still resting in his palms, which sit loosely in his lap.

"Yes," he says, softly. She has never wanted him closer than she does in this moment, the Force a vast and fathomless abyss, its song closer to a lullaby than the spacer's shanties she so often hears in it. "Yes, you're right. You must defeat me eventually. Will you take the crystal?"

It feels like he's giving her his permission. Rey _hates_ it.

"Not for that purpose," she says, closing her eyes against the stubborn tears that spring. "You're not— you can't—"

"It will have to be one of us," he says simply, if regretfully.

She shakes her head. Resisting the urge to grind her teeth in despairing frustration is, for a second, the most difficult thing she's ever had to do. "No."

"Rey—"

"I won't do it," she says, head flying up to glare at him through the tears. And if she reaches for him, if she blocks in his vision with her fingers and mushes his cheeks a little, her skin hot against his scar and his beauty marks, no one else is around to comment. This belongs to them. "You're going to live, Ben Solo. You don't get to do that to me. I'm not going to be your _executioner."_

"Rey," he says again, a little helpless, a little breathless.

She swallows.

"But," she says with dignity, "having that kyber crystal would be rather helpful."

Kylo leans forward with a creaky, startled sound escaping his mouth from somewhere deep within, an unconscious, involuntary huff of laughter that shakes them both to the core, and he rests his forehead against hers. "You—you're never going to stop being a scavenger. Are you?"

"Well, it's a fairly useful skill," she tries to say, tries to make it come out smart and sharp, but the Force is pressing in, the Force is in this moment, the Force is pleased and it _wants_ them here. She reels from the sheer depth of It and holds him close, fingers clenching in his heavy cloak.

It doesn't often make its opinion so clearly _known_ like this. His shoulders are tense under her arms, his brows are furrowed against hers, and she realizes—he's never felt _It_ as it was on Jakku, the color and the shape of it, its songs on a clear day and its wild, untamed power in the desert winds. Even their meeting on Ahch-To hadn't quite been like this.

Ahch-To, in her experience, is muted in every shade. The Force flows more calmly there than near anywhere else Rey's been in the galaxy. Maybe that's why when they touched hands, she saw a vision almost like a prophecy instead of—this enormity, this thing larger than themselves, beyond their full comprehension.

"What's happening?" Kylo mumbles to himself, nearly soundless. She feels the words in the vibration of the air between them, so close they breathe in each other more than anything else.

Rey presses his fingers to let him know she's there, and she gently plucks the kyber crystal from his yielding hands. "I feel it, too."

"The Force? I'd think so."

Unvarnished sarcasm from a man caught completely off-guard. She doesn't move, but she tucks the kyber crystal into a pouch at her belt.

 _Sounds like his father,_ she is careful not to think.

"Ben," she says, curling her fingers back into his cloak and relishing the heat of him so near to her while she can. She closes her eyes again and feels the currents settling around them into gentle eddies. "Listen. Don't die. Don't try to."

 _Don't go before all this is finished. Don't run from whatever this is, whatever the Force—It—this presence— is leading us to._

 _Don't leave me._

 _Please._

"All things die," he whispers. His thoughts are transparent to her: the light in Han Solo's eyes, the way it had faded, his grey hair lit from behind like a halo.

But not that alone. All the battles he has fought, a warlord in a castle of steel bones and sharp angles, play at the forefront of his mind—the reasons he doesn't sleep, the sights he has never once forgotten—all of it combined with the seeping corruption still clinging to his unexamined facets, Snoke's influence from beyond the grave, his last parting gift. Rey feels this all in a jumble of half-collected thoughts and strong conflicting emotions.

He is not an especially verbal thinker. It comes in flashes, portraits defined by light and shadow, all fuzzy at the edges like the one time she'd gotten deathly ill and waited things out in her hammock, staring at the same patch of her rusted-out AT-AT for long enough that time itself stood still. Her mind, analytical as it is, has to stay the initial impulse to sort it all out into boxes that make some kind of logical sense.

There will be time to do that later. Now is now, and in some strange way, he needs this.

Rey squeezes his arms. "You know what I meant."

"Yes." He doesn't promise. She doesn't ask him to.

They fall into silence, shifting a little closer, adjusting an arm here and a leg there to make it more comfortable. An alcove in an entryway to a quiet cantina is not the most private place to embrace your mortal enemy like it's the last moment you'll ever have with them, but Rey can make do.

The past is not the present is not the future. She saw the shape of one future, bright and clear, but the light had been so blinding she couldn't see how far it had been from where she was. But this, here, is the present moment, Kylo in her arms, breathing her air. Allowing her into his space.

They both are and are not something. There has been too little opportunity and too vast an ocean of differences between them to truly become friends, at least not the way normal people do—not like Poe or Kaydel, who spent their lives in and around communities of other people, sentients of all kinds, just making their way in the galaxy.

 _Although,_ Rey tells herself with some irony, _Poe and Kaydel are hardly_ normal.

But even so—even so—

Rey swallows.

She hardly knows the interior space of love. Either she was too far away or she watched it crumble into the desert sands, forgotten when the hunger went on too long and became too sharp and gnawing. She doesn't know exactly when she was born, but she knows that by now, she is nineteen standard years—more or less—and that most sentients consider that to be very, very young. Hardly long enough to know something like that.

But.

Something in her dies a little bit more every time Kylo refuses to acknowledge that it isn't too late. She wants to know the shape of him, to roam him and create a map of all the crevices of his strange, desperately hurt heart. If they were anyone else, if they were not the Force's scions, if her life did not suddenly extend far beyond her in ways she has only begun to scratch the surface of—

"I guess that's why the crystal chamber is so small," Rey muses. Kylo startles, withdraws a bit, and she doesn't let herself reach out for him. "Fist-sized, really…"

Kylo, evidently, feels too somber to laugh. But the tension in his shoulders relaxes, just a tad, and she counts that as a small victory before he withdraws and stands, offering her a hand up.

Rey stands on her own. His hand falls to his side.

"I suppose," he says, pausing so awkwardly that she winces, "I have to go eventually."

"You have Supreme Leading to do." She nods.

A painful beat passes.

"Rey…" He swallows. His eyes are dark and serious. For the first time since they ran into each other, she sees the boy that had guided her out of the long dark in him. "I won't. Die, I mean. Don't die either."

Although she really, truly oughtn't, her whole body pivots toward him, and she wants to reach out and—something. Do something. Touch him again, maybe. Or take his hand in hers and never let go. But she saw both It and Snoke in his mind, the influence his monster of a false Master still holds over him, the slow work It— _the Force,_ she reminds herself, still wonders if that is too limiting a term—is doing on his hurt spirit, and she knows he needs more time.

"I won't," she tells him, and the truth of it sings in her blood.

* * *

 **This is looking like a threeshot, but we'll see how it goes.**

 **I essentially took Snoke and some big general ideas about Abeloth from the EU and mashed them together, because monsters of all kinds are interesting even when I don't want to fuck them. For the record: no, I do not want to fuck Snoke. DJ calling the Supremacy "Snoke's boudoir" just really /got/ to me. We don't need to know everything about him, and I don't even necessarily want to because not knowing let me do some very fun stuff in this very fic, but that's /such/ a specific thing to say about any kind of thing in a Star Wars film. So I basically asked myself: what would make this /spooky?/**

 **Here's my answer. Hope you enjoy reading!**


	2. Chapter 2

When he is thirty going on thirty-one, Ben Solo still dreams. He hates every minute of it.

Here is something Ben Solo would perhaps tell no one, save for possibly the one bright shining star in the galaxy, the woman who is at once his most formidable enemy and the only hope he has had in all the long years since he began to walk this path: Snoke met his end on board the _Supremacy,_ but he still speaks to Ben in the morass between the waking world and the too-frequent nightmares.

"Looking tired, Supreme Leader." Hux's terribly annoying voice cuts into Ben's thoughts. Glancing up reveals more of the same he's been forced to bear witness to over the past several standard months filled with these meetings: Hux, smarming in his general direction, and the slow cadre of groupies he's assembled among the First Order command chain trying not to smirk directly in the face of the Supreme Leader.

At least, Ben reflects with an utter weariness in his bones, he has his helmet back.

"I didn't know you were so skilled at projection, General. Perhaps I ought to put you in charge of holo communications as well," Ben replies, distantly satisfied when the crackling hiss of his damaged voice modulator snaps, pops, and makes some of the younger officers jump. "Tell me again how the effort to secure the Corellian Trade Spine is going."

Hux's face twists for the most fleeting of moments as a boiling, long-suppressed rage boils beneath his surface. Once Ben would have drawn on that for strength, just as Snoke did, taking it into himself and amplifying it, but now...

 _Do it, boy,_ the voice whispers in his mind for the first time in a series of small eternities. Snoke's voice. It doesn't startle him like it should. Where before it had been sibilant, running down the length of his veins and settling somewhere near his fingertips, urging him to action, now it seems petulant. Like it is half of what it had once been.

 _Do it now. Use his own anger to destroy him._

Ben can't seem to find the motivation to make use of Hux's rage any more, despite how dearly he enjoys the ability to get under the General's skin and see him get his proper comeuppance. The Dark sets itself into your spine and tries to curl around your chest in a wreath of tangled vines. At first it seems like power, pure and distilled, the essence of action. It feels like...

...like action, he supposes. Like being the warlord Kylo Ren, the dark knight of the First Order.

Hux's expression evens out. His mind simmers, watching. It is patient and careful and calculating.

Not unlike Snoke.

"Of course, Supreme Leader," Hux says, almost as if to himself. "We're making excellent progress. After our last setback, we struck back against the Corellian rebels with double the manpower..."

 _Be careful,_ Ben's mind hums, follows a winding trail along the river of past wrongs and finds a spot where a man in dark armor had sat in meetings just like these and thought _a lifetime of aching, and I lost the only thing in the galaxy worth having._

 _(Ani, something wonderful has happened.)_

The dreams have begun to blur into daily life, locking him out of the flow of time and space, and that he does not care where the process ends is perhaps what frightens him the most.

 _All things die,_ he thinks to himself, and knows that it is the only thought he can be sure is his own.

* * *

Rey's 'saber crackles and hums underneath the grip of her palm. It's not finished yet. She still has to fiddle with some of the wiring, judging by the intensity of the plasma beams, which are a shade too strong for the old technical manual's specifications.

But... then again, maybe she'll leave it.

Open war with the First Order is once again on the horizon. General Organa looks more and more drawn by the day, even though she still holds herself stiff and proud. Poe is taking on more duties and Kaydel has quickly become his right-hand woman.

Then there is Rey, the warrior from the sands, the last Jedi... and last hope of the free galaxy.

A powerful warrior in need of a powerful weapon. Makes sense to her.

"So the legends were true," she breathes, mostly to herself, wondering at the weapon in her hand and the weight of the destiny she seems to have stumbled into. She is grubby and greasy from a fevered night of working on the destroyed chassis of Skywalker's saber, salvaging the best way she knows how, and at some point in the early hours of the morning the other mechanics in the Resistance base on Savareen got the idea that she wasn't about to stop for some futile mortal need like _sleep_ and left well enough alone.

Finn and Rose, on the other hand, didn't seem to get the message.

"Whoa," Finn murmurs, his eyes following the length of the blade from one glowing end to another. The scavenger in Rey prickles a bit at his attention- _mine,_ she hisses, like she'll be watching him fly a ship she built into the horizon line if she gives him, anyone, half a chance-but this is Finn, hand interlaced with Rose's, both of them sitting slouched on a crate, in no position to make any sudden grabs for her work.

"And all the Jedi did this?" Rose asks, leaning forward, other hand supporting her chin. "They must have really been something. I wish I could've watched them at it."

Rey flicks the activation button and watches the blades shrink back into the handle without incident. "Me too," she says, pushing her hair back from her forehead and making a face at the feel of the limp strands beneath her fingers.

That's when she senses _It._ Subtle as a shift in the light breeze winding through the underground vents once designed to keep the tunnels and coaxium processing rooms free of the toxic gases sometimes emitted in the process of fuel purification, _It_ slides into the room-something she might not have noticed if not for the quiet little spark that jolts under her skin, alerting her to the fact that she's being watched.

She glances to the doorway of the astromech repair room, hoping it might be Poe or Kaydel come to fetch them, or a mechanic come to brave the great big mess she's made.

 _No,_ whispers something dark and faint and viciously pleased at the thrill of fear that runs down her spine. _Did you think I was so easily defeated? Come, girl, you know better._

"Rey?"

"Is this Force stuff?"

Rey only realizes she's stood when she hones in on her friends' alarmed expressions. "I think-no, yes-probably, this is-"

 _Walk with me, child. See the boundaries. Look beyond them._

"Not on your _life,"_ she snarls, whirling to the darkness shadowing the other half of the room, thrusting her hands out and pushing with all she has against the force trying to pull her consciousness into itself. "I have seen _enough_ of you!"

A bright, thunderous _crack_ sounds in her mind, and whatever she does, _It_ howls in anger, multiple interlayered voices screeching their displeasure for her to hear. Rey stumbles back, tripping over Rose's leg, and topples half over her friend in an undignified heap. For a moment they're a tangle of confused limbs, then Rose locks her arms around Rey's middle and-not unlovingly-hefts her off to the side. "Rey, what's happening?"

"He's back," Rey says, dazed by the feedback of each angry voice looping in on itself and overlapping each other multiple times. "I just-hurt him. I think."

Finn tenses. "You mean... _him?_ Kylo Ren?"

"Well, I-no! No, not Kylo. I meant Snoke," she says, shaking her head and hoping very hard that the strange look that passes over Finn's face is not, in fact, suspicion. "You know. The old Supreme Leader. Golden bathrobe?"

"He's dead, Rey," Finn says slowly. "You killed him yourself."

 _Or didn't you?_ she can almost hear, but admitting to the truth would mean admitting to some other truths, and those other truths would require a full explanation of the situation, and the official version, the version Kylo had undoubtedly told the First Order when it got out, is all over the galaxy, and...

Rey swallows. "Well. It seems like cutting him in half only did... half the job?"

It comes out like a question. It should _not_ be a question. Finn gives her a _look,_ but before he can say anything more, Rose speaks up.

"How powerful would someone need to be in the Force for them to _not_ pass away with their physical body?"

They fall silent, considering the question. It hangs in the air the way the silence on Jakku used to, and Rey had never wanted to feel that again, never wanted to remember it.

"I don't know," she says, struggling to put a point on what exactly it is she wants to say. She frowns. "Maybe it's not about how powerful you are in the Force. The Force isn't... if you think it's all about power..."

"You fall into the same trap as the Jedi did?" Finn rubs his chin in thought. There's a pensive look in his eyes, and not for the first time, Rey wonders what he saw of the Force during his time as a Stormtrooper. He still doesn't talk about it much, gently but firmly insisting that his place is in the present, but she has learned by now that the past is hardly an immutable monolith. The past is not the present is not the future, but it walks alongside you anyways. "Maybe so."

The danger of the moment passes, and the three of them breathe a little easier. Rey manages to fit in some more tinkering with her 'saber, aided by Rose, before Finn catches wind of how long she's been up and fusses her into both a sonic shower and a rest as soon as he and Rose take off for their next mission. Alone in her cramped corners with the tall slitted windows that angle the strong desert sunlight up toward the ceiling, Rey crosses her arms over her chest and tracks the cracks in the sandstone walls until she drifts off.

* * *

In her sleep, Rey dreams.

 _You want to save him._

A man's voice, young and unfamiliar. He feels like dry desert and burning suns, which is strange, because of all things, _that_ ought to feel familiar to her.

"No. Not exactly," she says, already knowing who _him_ is (because who else was it ever going to be?), and finds that it's mostly true. She _had_ wanted to, before the Supremacy. Before she had realized that neither of them were ready for what confronting the truth entailed.

 _Then what do you want?_ He pauses, as if he finds the words difficult to say. _What do you want from Kylo Ren?_

In the real world, she might've been offended, or caught off-guard. Here in the center of herself, it's the easiest thing in the galaxy to reply, "I want Ben Solo to find peace."

Silence.

Then: _Rey._

 _I hope you find what you're looking for, too._

 _That's the only way any of this is going to work._

"What?" Rey asks, bewildered, but the starlight in her eyes evens into shades of grey as her body beckons to her from beyond, calling her to consciousness.

* * *

She wakes with a faded memory of coordinates and the image of a vast blue planet, nearly all ocean, lingering in her mind.

* * *

"I'm surprised you didn't just up and leave," General Organa says wryly when, three days later, Rey approaches her with no ability to explain and an apology on her lips. The morning on Savareen is brisk, but the only addition to the General's wardrobe is a scarf, loosely draped over her shoulders. Rey opens her mouth, but General Organa holds up a hand. "I know the Force too, Rey. I was never trained as my brother was, but I know when it's at work. Go."

Rey stares for an awkward few seconds, trying to figure out how to thank her properly. General Organa directs a raised eyebrow at her.

Chewie, sitting at the General's side, makes a _harrumphing_ noise.

 _Speak, child,_ he says to her, a fondness she still isn't used to clear in his chiding. _Leia will not speak for you._

"Thank you," Rey blurts out finally, feeling her face heat up.

"For what?" Leia asks, almost curiously, but she waves her hand in dismissal before Rey is forced to elaborate. "Go on, start your preparations. You'll want to be well-stocked before traipsing across the galaxy."

Bereft of any other action, Rey nods sheepishly and makes for the door.

"Rey." It's Leia, her voice commanding.

She pauses, her palm on the door switch.

"Wherever you go, you'll always have a place with us."

Her heart hammers in her chest. When she speaks, her voice shakes. "I- I know."

"May the Force be with you, Rey of Jakku." A pause hangs in the air, but whatever Leia was going to say, she seems to have decided against it. Chewie snorts; the sound of his paw settling comfortingly on Leia's shoulder reaches Rey's ears, and tears spring to her eyes.

"You, too, General," Rey manages, and flees before Leia can say anything else.


End file.
